Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (34 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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The court never pronounced. There was a fatal weakening in Wolsey’s
resolve: he realised that, given the notoriety of the case and its international ramifications, his judgement could easily be quashed in Rome. Furthermore, it would be impossible to grant the divorce by stealth. Seeking security in numbers, he asked the most learned theologians in England – amongst them John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, and Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London – for their opinions on the issue. Fisher replied robustly that there was no sound reason why the marriage should have been prohibited and ‘considering the fullness of authority given by our Lord to the Pope, who can deny that the latter may give a dispensation for any serious cause?’
85
Not helpful.
It was therefore no cut-and-dried case. Furthermore, news of an unexpected problem stunned London on 1 June. Rome had been sacked by Imperial troops during one of those endless wars on Italian soil and Pope Clement VII and his cardinals had fled for safety into the Castello St Angelo, overlooking the River Tiber. One observer wrote:
What Goths, what Vandals, what Turks were ever like this army of the Emperor in the sacrilege they have committed? They strewed on the ground the sacred body of Christ [consecrated hosts], trod under foot the relics of the saints to steal their ornaments. No church or monastery was spared. They violated nuns amid the cries of their mother [superiors].
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It would hardly be business as usual in the Vatican.
On 22 June Henry finally summoned up enough courage to admit to his queen that he planned to divorce her on the grounds that they had been living in mortal sin for eighteen years. This being the opinion of the churchmen he had consulted, he said, she should now name the English nunnery to which she would retire gracefully, while yet retaining her dignity.
It was a forlorn hope, to expect her to go quietly. Katherine burst into floods of tears ‘and being too much agitated to reply’ Henry tried to console her by weakly promising ‘that all should be done for the best’ before fleeing her apartments, thoroughly chastened. The Spanish envoy Mendoza heard more about the confrontation:
The king begged her to keep secrecy upon what he had told her. Not that the people of England are ignorant of the king’s intentions, for the affair is [as] notorious as if it had been proclaimed by the public crier, but they cannot believe that he will ever carry so wicked a purpose into effect.
Katherine wanted her nephew Charles V to make ‘every possible effort … with the Pope to deprive the cardinal of his legatine powers’ – a shrewd move, since Pope Clement VII was virtually in the Emperor’s pocket. Mendoza coloured his dispatch with some wishful thinking:
There is so much feeling expressed here about the queen’s divorce … that should 6,000 or 7,000 men land on the coast of Cornwall to espouse [her] cause, 40,000 Englishmen would at once join them …
A cold douche of realism then quenched his righteous indignation and he added the cautionary ‘ … though popular favour often fails when put to the test’.
87
Henry, with a strange sense of detachment from the hornet’s nest he had disturbed, then went off hunting in Hertfordshire and Essex, entertaining a large party at his house at Beaulieu. Sir William Fitzwilliam, Treasurer of the Household, wrote despairingly to Wolsey:
The king is keeping a very great and expensive house for here are lodged the Duke of Norfolk and his wife, the Duke of Suffolk, the Marquis of Exeter, the Earls of Oxford, Essex and Rutland, Viscounts Fitzwalter and Rochford … and others.
I and the other officers intended to reduce the expenses this summer but I do not see how this can be done.
The king is merry and in good health and hunts daily.
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Wolsey counselled his master to handle the queen ‘both gently and docilely’
89
before he scurried majestically off through France to a convocation of refugee cardinals in Avignon in an abortive attempt to reorganise church governance, as Clement was
hors de combat
. As he rode, he was ‘hourly musing’ on Henry’s ‘great and secret affair’ and on how to free the king from his ‘pensive and dolorous life’ for the ‘continuance of your health and the surety of your realm and succession’.
Pausing breathlessly at Abbeville only to dash off a letter to the king, he wrote that
I consider the Pope’s consent must be gained in case the queen should decline my jurisdiction or the approbation of the cardinals be had.
For the first, the Pope’s deliverance will be necessary, for the other the convocation of the cardinals in France.
If the Pope were delivered, I doubt not he would be easily induced to do everything to your good satisfaction and purpose.
90
Meanwhile, Henry’s affair with Anne was gathering momentum. Seventeen of his love letters to her survive, beginning with one preserved in the Vatican Library, probably dating from January 1527 and written in French, with a few crossings-out. The king was delighted by her New Year’s gift of a bespoke trinket – a tiny model of a ship crewed by a single girl – given possibly to heal a lover’s tiff. Henry wrote wistfully:
The proofs of your affection are such … that they constrain me ever truly to honour, love and serve you …
Praying you also that if ever I have in any way done you offence that you will give me the same absolution that you ask, ensuring you that henceforth my heart shall dedicate to you alone, greatly desirous that so my body could be as well, as God can bring to pass if it pleases Him.
91
This now had gone much further than courtly love.
But Henry was unsure of where he stood with Anne Boleyn. An early letter prayed her to
expressly certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two. I must ensure me of this answer having been now above one whole year struck with the dart of love, not being assured either of failure or of finding place in your heart …
Which last point has kept me for some little time from calling you my mistress, since if you do not love me in a way which is beyond common affection, that name in no way belongs to you, for it denotes a singular love, far removed from the common.
92
The king was not at this stage offering marriage – rather the status of
official royal mistress, copying the French royal fashion.
93
But that would not solve his problems of a male heir; he already had one royal bastard in his form book.
Then, amid showers of expensive jewellery lavished on the dark-haired girl, marriage with her became Henry’s all-consuming ambition. A ring set with emeralds was given to Anne during Henry’s stay at Beaulieu that August. This was the first of many such costly trinkets during the following months: ‘a diamond in a brooch of Our Lady of Boulogne’; ‘nineteen diamonds for her head’; two bracelets set with ten diamonds and eight pearls; ‘two diamonds on two hearts for her head’ and so on.
94
In another billet-doux to Anne, Henry complained that the brief time spent parted from her felt ‘like a whole fortnight’ and that his letter was shorter than usual ‘because of a pain in my head’. He ended his sickly-sweet note: ‘Wishing myself specially in an evening in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty dubbys [breasts] I trust shortly to cusse [kiss]’.
95
Henry scribbled a message in French to Anne on a page portraying Christ as the ‘Man of Sorrows’ in his prayer book during Mass in the Chapel Royal: ‘If you remember my love in your prayers as strongly as I worship you I shall hardly be forgotten for I am yours. Henry R. Forever.’ Anne replied in a hastily written English couplet: ‘By daily proof you shall me find/To be to you both loving and kind.’ Calculatingly, perhaps, her notes were written below an illustration of the Annunciation when the angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary she would have a son (Plate 17).
96
Some time in the late summer of 1527 the king ignored Wolsey’s advice and sent the experienced diplomat William Knight to Rome on a mission with three secret objectives. Firstly, he was to obtain papal annulment of the marriage to Katherine and secondly, absolution of Henry’s sin in living with her as man and wife. The third objective was yet more controversial and damning as, implicitly, Henry was acknowledging his earlier adultery and his desire to marry Anne Boleyn as soon as possible. Ironically, to achieve that, papal dispensation was required for this second marriage as Anne was ‘a woman related to himself in the first degree of affinity’ as the sister of his former bedmate Mary Boleyn. No
surprise then that the contents of the letter that Knight was to hand over to Clement VII were kept secret, ‘which no man doth know but they … will never disclose it to any man living for any craft [subterfuge] the Cardinal or any other can find’.
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The fact that this was done behind Wolsey’s back while he was away in France must signal Henry’s avid desire for Anne. The cardinal quickly got wind of the plan and of rumours at court that the king believed he was dragging his heels over the divorce. He wrote an excruciatingly subservient letter to Henry from Compiegne on his way back to England:
I shall never be found but as your most humble, loyal and faithful obedient servant … [enduring] the travails and pains which I daily and hourly sustain without any regard to the continuance of my life and health which is only preserved by the assured trust of your gracious love and favour … I intend to depart hence … continuing my journey towards your highness with such diligence as my old and [cracked] body may endure.
There was never lover more desirous of the sight of his lady than I am of your most noble and royal person.
98
By the time Wolsey arrived back at court, he found the king with Anne and willing to allow him into his presence only with her approval.
99
It was an early portent of the shape of things to come.
Clement VII had now escaped his enforced confinement, but he was still caught on the prongs of a painful regal pitchfork: should he grant Henry, his ‘Defender of the Faith’, all he desired, based on the grounds of an imperfect dispensation by his predecessor, or reject the divorce and so placate Katherine’s nephew, the all-powerful Emperor Charles V? As usual, prevarication was the papal answer. Despite intense rival diplomatic activity by both English and Imperial agents, the Vatican flaccidly proposed a legatine commission to examine the validity of Henry’s marriage, appointing the gout-ridden Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio to limp his way across Europe to preside, with Wolsey, over proceedings in London. Campeggio was the official ‘protector’ of England in the Vatican and was the absentee Bishop of Salisbury. He was a heavy, sluggish and tired man with a long straggling beard, but his appearance hid a clever expert in canonical law.
100
Henry soon offered
him the lucrative bishopric of Durham as an incentive for making the right decision. Campeggio, however, had three secret strategies from the Pope to pursue: firstly to persuade the king to drop the idea of divorce; secondly to persuade the queen to enter a nunnery; and thirdly, to proceed as slowly as possible.
101
It was glaringly apparent that Katherine enjoyed vocal popular support as a spurned queen and on Sunday 8 November 1528, Henry summoned his counsellors and leading London citizens to Bridewell to hear his sanitised version of events.
Although it has pleased almighty God to send us a fair daughter … begotten to our great comfort and joy, yet it has been told to us by diverse great clerks that she is neither a lawful daughter nor her mother our lawful wife but that we have lived together abominably and detestably in open adultery.
Think you, my lords, that these words touch not my body and soul, think you that these doings do not daily and hourly trouble my conscience and vex my spirits?
Katherine was a woman
of most gentleness, of most humility and buxomness, yes, and of all good qualities … she is without comparison as I this twenty years almost have had the true experiment. If I were to marry again, if the marriage might be good, I would choose her above all other women.
But if it be determined by judgement that our marriage was against God’s law and clearly void, then I shall not only sorrow the departing from so good a lady and loving companion, but much more lament and bewail my unfortunate chance that I have so long lived in adultery to God’s great displeasure, and have no true heir of my body to inherit this realm.
These be the sores that vex my mind. These be the pangs that trouble my conscience. For these griefs I seek a remedy.
The king failed to win their sympathy, still less their support. The chronicler Hall reported that some of Henry’s audience
sighed and said nothing. Others were sorry to hear the king so troubled in his conscience. Others that favoured the queen much sorrowed that this matter was now opened and so every man spoke as his heart served him.
102

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